Anthropic's CCA Exam as a Field-Guide for Agentic Engineering
**Anthropic's CCA Exam: A Field-Guide for Agentic Engineering** The Claude Certified Architect (CCA) exam distills what Anthropic has learned from working with the AI companies shipping agents to production — the patterns that work, the anti-patterns that quietly burn tokens and trust, and the architectural decisions that separate demos from systems you'd stake a quarter on. This talk treats the exam as a field guide for agentic engineering, whether or not you ever sit for it. We'll walk through the five competency domains the exam tests — Agentic Architecture, Tool Design and MCP Integration, Claude Code, Prompt Engineering, and Context Management — with particular emphasis on multi-agent orchestration, subagent delegation, tool schema design, and lifecycle hooks. We'll then work through the six real-world scenarios the exam uses to probe judgment, each organized around an anti-pattern: the seductive-but-wrong move that looks reasonable until it costs you a production incident. Attendees leave with a working mental model of the agentic surface area and a checklist of the failure modes that matter most when moving from prototype to production. **Who should attend:** engineers and architects building agentic systems with Claude or other frontier models, technical leads evaluating agent designs, and developers considering the CCA credential.
About the Agentic Engineering Track
Agentic Engineering sessions at AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco.
When
Thursday, July 2, 2026
11:10 AM - 11:30 AM·20m
Where
Track 8 · Room 2020
Capacity: 250 attendees
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Speaker
Frank Coyle
Lecturer, University of California Berkeley
University California Berkeley
@coyle_frankp
Frank Coyle is a computer science educator with over thirty years of teaching experience, most recently as faculty at SMU and currently teaching Generative AI and Large Language Models at UC Berkeley and the University of Bologna. Frank is the founder of The AI Edge (codesupreme.ai), where he is launching Build to Certify, an eight-week cohort program preparing CS and engineering students for the Claude Certified Architect Foundations exam. His current focus is the practical craft of agentic AI engineering — tool design and MCP integration, context management, prompt engineering, and Claude Code workflows — taught through a hands-on "MAKE before explain" pedagogy. He is equally at home explaining tool-use loops to engineers and translating frontier AI concepts for audiences ranging from district attorneys to formerly-incarcerated students learning to code.